Howard Fineman

Obama was elected as a sensation, but he is isn’t governing as one. He is putting points on the board, sometimes with little notice and comparatively less fuss than either was anticipated or was the case in the past.

The best way to understand what is going on in politics this fall is to think of the difference between Facebook and Twitter. Barack Obama in 2008 was a product of Facebook, a one-man brand. The Tea Party counterrevolution of 2010 is more diffuse and fast-moving, a Twitter-based hive mind with no one central figure.

One day in the winter of 2005, I was in a Senate hallway when the new guy from Illinois arrived for a vote. Sen. Barack Obama—pop-star charisma, limitless possibility—knew his own allure. Three years later, of course, the nation knew it, too.

President Obama takes the fifth anniversary of Katrina—the deadliest and costliest natural catastrophe in American history—to try to defend the proposition that the federal government can actually help people.

Two years ago in Denver, the charismatic Obama caught the political wave, addressing a blissed-out crowd of 80,000 on a stage set as a Greek temple with him as the high priest of new government activism. But an anti-Democratic tide is building, and if the Republicans can win 39 House seats in November, Boehner could be speaker.

Admittedly, it's a slow news day. Congress is in recess, Obama is on the Vineyard, so reporters such as yours truly find themselves in Cleveland to witness one of those shopworn campaign ploys in action as Rep. John Boehner calls for pink slips for Obama's economic advisers Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. But calling for someone's head is always worth a graph or two in a wire story.

Barack Obama did not descend from the clouds. Polling was involved, as were focus groups and the usual marketing machinery. You didn’t hear much about number crunching in 2008; you don’t hear much about it now. Obama couldn’t, and can’t, be seen as unsoiled and sui generis if his handlers talk too much about mechanics.

"Hardball" host Chris Matthews has a theory about Barack Obama: he is running his presidency as though there is no tomorrow—that is, no second term. So far in his presidency Obama has been tackling, even seeking out, sweeping, controversial challenges: the stimulus, the auto bailout, health-care reform, a new arms-control treaty with Russia. So, is he in a hurry because he figures there may be no second term?

Only a few senators could have pulled off what Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, did last week: snagging major airtime at two high-profile confirmation hearings, seemingly at the same time.

Elena Kagan's confirmation process has become a trial in absentia for competing views on how the Supreme Court should work, personified by two very different justices, John Roberts and Thurgood Marshall.

Barack Obama, as candidate and president, in effect created the IED known as Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Now that improvised explosive device has blown up in the midst of the Obama presidency. The damage is severe, if not crippling.

Do political candidates still need the press? Based on what’s going on in Kentucky, where I began my career, I’m no longer sure. After saying a few weeks ago that a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach, Rand Paul is sticking to safe, controlled venues. A public meeting of Republicans in Louisville was not one of them—two top reporters showed up.

President Obama had good reason to tread lightly in his Oval Office address Tuesday night: he was in the midst of coaxing a $20 billion-plus commitment out of a London-based company that already has lost half of its market value.

Somewhere between Pensacola and the Oval Office, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico went from an “assault” to an “epidemic”—and President Obama went from commander in chief to surgeon general. And that, in short, is why his speech to the nation fell so flat even as he delivered it.

Obama and BP are locked in a deadly, messy transatlantic dance. The U.S., deeply in debt and facing a voter rebellion over that fact, needs as many billions as it can siphon from London-based BP to pay for the cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico.

Election Day 2010 is five months away, so predicting the November bottom line is foolish. But as the primary season grinds on (Tuesday was the biggest day yet), you can get a sense of themes and trends likely to dominate the fall campaigns. Here are a few.

President Obama's stunning rise was said to be proof that our political system was still running as the Founders built it. But on the biggest primary day of the year, it doesn’t seem that way to dismayed voters across the country.

It's a good idea for Obama to pledge a path to citizenship: it respects the idea of "two worlds"—giving Latino voters a sense that they are valued for who they are, not who they have to become, which a new study shows is very important to them.

They were an odd couple from the start, a teenage romance that tried—and, after 40 years, failed—to bridge the divides that were inherent in it from the start: political versus nonpolitical Washington; ambition versus another day at the beach; a need to internalize and intellectualize versus the drummer in the band.

BP officials hope their “top kill” works, choking off a catastrophically leaky oil well with an injection of heavy mud. Meanwhile, President Obama’s own “top kill” is under way, as he tries to control political damage from the disaster.

The notion that Rand Paul is a libertarian babe in Kentucky’s political woods is false. He long ago got help from Republican professionals—and is getting more as he tries to recover from his disastrous national debut.

If Americans think of Kentucky at all, they tend not to regard it as part of the Deep South on racial matters: no history of water cannons fired at civil-rights demonstrators; the kind of place that gave the world a proud and defiant Muhammad Ali, not a brutal and racist Bull Connor.
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Rep. Bob Brady is a big beefy Irishman who embodies, as much as anyone, the Democratic machine in Philadelphia. He's a mainstay in the House of what's left of the "Pennsylvania Corner" on the floor, and an ally of former mayor and still Gov. Ed Rendell. ...

The rain has stopped, but it's still cold, gloomy, and damp here in Philadelphia's Center City district. I'm at a polling place—the 15th Division of the 8th Ward of the City of Philadelphia—and the turnout is very light. Of the approximately 1,000 voters registered to vote at the old Sidney Hillman Clinic on Chestnut Street, only 71 had done so by 4 p.m. "It's very slow," said a poll worker stationed by one of the new electronic voting machines in the auditorium. "Maybe it'll pick up."
Sen. Arlen Specter had better hope so. If he is going to hold off the hard-charging Rep. Joe Sestak, Specter is going to need a decent city turnout of traditional (older, Jewish, black, and academia) voters. So far today, he isn't getting it.
All of the big-city wiseguys who met for lunch with a close friend of mine are saying, "Arlen by one." Not exactly a strong vote of confidence.

When he ran for president, Barack Obama’s effervescent campaign was about hope, optimism, national unity, and, above all, the future. He offered a vision of a new world cooperatively shaped by a new generation. The message was mostly positive and upbeat, in part because it was obvious that outgoing Republican President George W. Bush had made a hash of the economy and led the country into two controversial wars. Americans, Obama strategists felt, wanted the uplift of looking forward.